1. Field of the Invention
This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/420,021, filed May 24, 2006, filed by Kavita Agrawal, et al., and commonly assigned. This invention pertains to technologies for managing and optimizing an electronic itinerary, agenda, calendar, or other Personal Information Management resource to maximize wireless connectivity during designated priority periods.
2. Background of the Invention
Many people often use an electronic agenda, itinerary, route plan, or calendar to organize their daily activities. Products such as Lotus Organizer™, Microsoft Outlook™ provide such calendar and contact management functions for desktop and laptop computers. Portable devices such as personal information management (“PIM”), personal digital assistants (“PDA”), and wireless telephones also provide calendar and contact management functions. Bridges between the two are also common, such as Motorola MobilePhoneTools™, or Palm Desktop™, which synchronize calendar events and contact information between portable devices and stationary computers.
Route plans are often produced separate of an itinerary or calendar. Online services such as MapQuest™ and Yahoo! Maps™, global position system navigation systems such as devices offered by Garmin Corporation, and software products for personal computers and PDA's such as the Streets & Trips 2006™ product from Microsoft Corporation, are often used to develop an electronic route plan.
As people have become more and more reliant on their wireless telephone, these synchronization and integration functions have become increasingly popular. At certain times of a day, however, a user may have a critical need for wireless connectivity, such as a scheduled conference call during a time the user expects or plans to be away from his or her desk.
Additional wireless capabilities are also becoming critically important at certain times of a user's day. For example, if a user is expecting to need to work on a document over a wireless network at a time of a meeting with a client at the client's facilities, the user needs to have a reliable wireless connection during this period.
In this way, in the wireless space, as it relates to business travelers or consumers alike, there exists a need for robust or continuous wireless connectivity for voice and data communications, especially during certain periods of time or certain activities.
Typically, however, a person's work day may be roughly laid out by an electronic calendar, itinerary, route plan, or agenda, but the order or sequence of the activities is not planned or optimized based on wireless service availability during those times and at the locations of those activities.
Very primitive solutions to solve this problem have been attempted, such as users manually looking at a coverage map for a particular wireless service (e.g. voice service or wireless “hot spot” map) to determine if he or she will be able to access the wireless services they require at a certain time for a certain activity. This manual process is prone to error, as many users forget to do this before the activity starts, only to find at the last minute that connectivity is poor or nonexistent. Additionally, even for those who plan ahead, connectivity as shown on a static coverage map does not effectively indicate times of congestion, low signal strength, channel unavailability, etc.
Further, even after route plans, itineraries, and calendars have been manually optimized for connectivity during specific events or legs of a route, conditions may change in real-time, such as unexpected congestion of cell tower channels or unexpected outages of Wi-Fi service, during the execution of a calendar or plan.